It’s Not Business. It’s Personal.

Sometimes I’ll work on a piece of copy, or a scene, or a dialogue exchange, when I start to clam up. My mind will race about all the things that I’m saying, and in some cases, I’ll let the characters just speak my inner thoughts. I’ll give an ad a piece of personalization, or I’ll turn a scene into a slice of life that I wish would happen. Of course, things don’t go to print this way, but these moments do allow for that necessary piece of humanization that writing requires. And edit after edit and rewrite after rewrite, that scene will morph. That ad will change. That line will become a character driven or a brand driven piece of writing that works with the tonality, at least, that’s what’s supposed to happen. Writers have to work for a living, but when someone tells me that a graph or a scene or a line that I write is just business, I get angry, and then I realize- that person is not a writer.

The public at large has already heard everything, seen everything, and most will think that they already know everything. That is a problem, because we really can’t say anything new. We can’t tell them anything they haven’t already heard. That’s why there’s a slew of lines that say  ”The fastest whatchamacallit just got faster.” Everything’s a cliché, and so it comes to us writers to make it resound. And that’s where it gets personal. A paycheck is a paycheck, but a word is a piece of personality. It’s our take on what sounds good, what feels good. We as writers are required to take the known and put our spin on it. We’re required to add that little slice of humanization that can make the difference between what gets noticed and what gets lost. And it makes the difference between truth and lies.

IKEA is one of the largest brands today. Yet, what I remember most about it is a little commercial about a lamp.

It’s just a lamp. But we get caught up in it. The narrator’s right on, we do feel sorry for it. We hate it for the lamp, just as we love when Pixar’s iconic lamp finds another ball to play with. But some writer out there took his personal experience and made it into a great idea. Tell him it’s just business, and he’ll tell you about the time his favorite stuffed animal was put out in a cardboard box for the Goodwill van to pick up. Or about the time when his dog was left outside in the rain, and he felt guilty as hell watching the pup hang his head down low and get soaked.

Tell me writing’s not personal, and I’ll show you a play with no meaning. A script that loses it at page one. Or an ad that I don’t give a second’s worth of time to. It is personal. Writing is more than personal. It’s our inner core of beliefs, structured to sell an idea. It’s everything we are.

It’s always personal.

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